comprehensive sexuality education (CSE)

ARROW, recognizes and caters to the evolving capacities of young people.

ARROW, particularly through the Women’s Health and Rights Advocacy Partnership South East Asia (WHRAP-SEA) and the Global South Youth partnership advocates for rights-based, non-discriminatory, evidence-based and youth-friendly comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) that recognizes and caters to the evolving capacities of young people. Recently, ARROW launched a mobile app titled SAFE (Sexuality Awareness for Everyone), a knowledge source on sexuality awareness.

WHRAP-SEA has been working through capacity building, evidence generation and partnership to address the issues of young people’s SRHR including their right to receive CSE. The Global South Youth partnership has recognized through its monitoring and reviewing that the lack of access to CSE is common across Global South regions and needs to be urgently addressed. Progress on imparting sex and sexuality education to adolescents in the region is staggered and uneven. Unmarried young people still face many barriers, some legal and some socially discriminatory, to accessing SRH services.

It is clear from the lack of provision of education, information, and services to young people who are in dire need of these, that governments in the region are hesitant to recognize the role of sexuality beyond its function in reproduction. Despite its benefits that extend to many areas of decision- making and confidence building among adolescents, CSE is still a distant aspiration in many parts of the world. The existing interpretation of sex/sexuality education emphasizes, in most cases, on biology rather than health and rights.

The lack of political will to overcome the challenges posed by religious and cultural fundamentalism is the main reason for the lack of implementation of CSE in the region.